They were married on the twenty-second of April, 1978, at the First Congregational Church of Merritt Falls, by the young minister in sandals, who wore real shoes for the occasion as a personal favor to Barbara. It was a soft, blowing, blue-and-white day. The forsythia along Juniper Lane had gone off like fireworks, and the tulips in Barbara's front bed had come up behind a fence of chicken wire, red and yellow and defiant, every one of them uneaten.
Delia wore an ivory dress with long sleeves and a high lace collar that her mother had driven all the way from Toledo in the back of a Buick, and the brass franc on a thin gold chain around her neck. Her hair was set the night before on Barbara's hot rollers and brushed out that morning in Barbara's bedroom by Barbara herself, in long feathered honey-blonde layers that swept back from her face and fell past her shoulders with so much volume that the veil had to be pinned twice. She did her own face at Barbara's vanity, with Barbara and her mother and her mother's sister all crowded in the doorway giving advice. Brows arched clean and high. Brown smoky liner, smudged soft. Peachy blush along the cheekbones. Glossy pink-nude lips. When she came down the stairs, Wes, waiting at the bottom in a brown three-piece suit and a fresh haircut that his mother had personally supervised, made a sound that everyone present agreed was the wrong pipe.
The reception was at the house. There was no cake. There were pies instead, twenty-two of them, lined up along the dining-room table under the taper candles: brandied apple and pumpkin and cherry and pecan and a chess pie from Delia's grandmother's recipe and a lattice-top rhubarb that Mrs. Moretti had brought down from New Haven on the train in a hatbox, and every one of them made with butter. The Lamplighters played in the living room with the furniture pushed back, and Ozzie Fratelli wept openly through the entire first dance. Delia's two brothers, the wrestlers, arm-wrestled Hal Szabo's son-in-law on the porch and lost. Hal danced with Barbara to every slow song, and some of the fast ones, and nobody said anything about it, and Barbara's cheeks stayed pink all afternoon.
On the wall in the front hall, in a plain wooden frame, hung a pink laundry ticket from the Laverie des Martyrs, stamped 24 AVR 1974, its blue ink gone to clouds. Beside it, in a matching frame, hung a thin blue airmail letter, opened at last, its creases gone translucent with age.
Late in the afternoon, when the light had gone long and gold across the yard, Ozzie's niece Angela, who was six and had been the flower girl and had taken the job very seriously, came and stood in front of the bride and groom where they sat together on the porch swing, and put her hands on her hips.
"My uncle says nobody will tell him the real story," she said. "How did you meet?"
Wes looked at Delia. Delia looked at Wes.
"A laundromat," said Wes.